Critical communities in commercial context: The narrative of Swedish art education in social media

Forsler, Ingrid

Södertörn University, School of Culture and Education, Media and Communication Studies.

2016 (English)In: IAMCR 2016 Media Education Research Section: Abstracts of papers presented at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Leicester, UK 27-31 July 2016, 2016, p. 13-13Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)

Abstract [en]

This study seeks to understand how visual art teachers in Sweden understands and manages the legacy of art education in relation to new media. Through content analysis of discussion taking place in social media networks for teachers, three main topics are identified: 1) subject specific topics, e.g. suggestions for projects on a certain theme or recommendations of digital tools 2) self produced content sharing, e.g. students work or planning and 3) meta reflection on the conditions of art education and digital media. This result was followed up with interviews with teachers active in the community, showing an ambiguity in the balance between raising critical and visually literate citizens and the pragmatic stance of “getting the work done”. In the discussion, these findings are connected to the history and terms for the subject as such. Visual arts education as a school subject in Sweden has undergone a change, from a focus on drawing to a focus on visual culture at large. This narrative is important for the teacher community and has led to an ongoing discussion on the boundaries and content of the subject. Further, it is suggested in the paper that critique against consumer society and positivist science is expressed within the art teacher community at the same time as the commercial infrastructures of the media systems remain invisible and unchallenged. Earlier research on the relation between education and new media have mainly focused on technology in a classroom context and less on larger media ecologies as commercial systems. The relation between visual culture and education have been thoroughly examined when it comes to everyday visual media as informal learning environments for children, but the role of the teacher in these environments remains an open question. This paper wishes to contribute to the field of technology and education by highlighting how a certain educational culture can be passed on through narratives in social media and how the tools for communication re-shapes this narrative. The study is a part of an ongoing PhD project that aims to investigate the tension between the educational infrastructure, new media ecologies and the imagined future citizen as expressed in the art teacher communities in Sweden, Estonia and Finland.